Why I Chose Ancient Coins

By Dean Kinzer

There are collectors, and then there are people who grow up in collecting families.

For me, this story starts long before ancient coins ever entered my life. It starts with my grandfather carefully organizing Morgan dollars into holders, working methodically toward completing sets. It starts with my dad proudly talking about the first baseball cards he ever bought — the 1958 Topps set — a set that famously started and ended with Ted Williams, his favorite player.

Collecting was never just a hobby in our house. It was part of life.

My father collected the same way he approached everything else: with passion, curiosity, and endless energy. Coins. Baseball cards. Cars. Motorcycles. Trilobites. Memorabilia. If something carried history or meaning, he wanted to learn about it and preserve it.

I still have old manila coin envelopes he typed himself on a typewriter dating back to 1962. Tiny little time capsules from decades ago. Every coin labeled carefully. Every detail important.

But none of it would have existed without my mother, Linda.

My mom did her best to support my father's interests while also trying to balance the realities of raising kids and keeping life together given our circumstances. She loved history, loved the arts, and above all, she loved us. While Dad was always chasing the next show, collection, or discovery, Mom was often the steady hand making sure the family stayed grounded.

As kids, we were brought into that world naturally. We had our own collections because Dad had collections. He was a business traveler, but instead of spending his free time sightseeing, he made a point to stop at coin shops and card shops in every city he visited. He loved shows. Loved dealer tables. Loved the hunt.

And we became part of it.

We helped him roll display cases into shows. We helped set up showcases. We watched him talk to collectors for hours. He dreamed of taking it further. For a brief time he even helped run a local card shop called Sports Card Heaven. It did not last long, but even then, you could tell this was what he truly wanted to do.

Life simply pulled him in other directions.

Eventually he returned to collecting as an individual seller, moving things on eBay while continuing to build his collections quietly over decades.

In his late sixties, my father began having health problems. I moved from downtown Chicago to help care for him. When he passed away in 2018, our family was left sorting through a lifetime of collections, memories, and unfinished projects.

We were never wealthy collectors. In truth, we were usually scraping by. But my dad's love for collecting never slowed down because of that. He collected because he genuinely loved the history, the hunt, and the stories behind the objects.

Over decades he accumulated an incredible variety of things — cards, coins, cars, motorcycles, fossils, and memorabilia — not through wealth, but through persistence, trades, flea markets, shows, late-night eBay listings, and years of searching.

Much of what remained after his passing ultimately went toward settling debts and responsibilities. But during the process of cataloging and untangling everything, I found myself drawn toward one part of the collection I knew very little about:

Ancient coins.

Dad was a Christian, and those coins mattered deeply to him. Widow's Mites. Tribute Pennies. Shekels of Tyre. Small pieces of history connected directly to the ancient world of the Bible and the Roman Empire.

Something about them grabbed me immediately.

These were not just collectibles. They felt different.

A baseball card could connect you to a player. A classic car could connect you to a generation. But an ancient coin? An ancient coin connected you to civilization itself.

These were objects touched by people two thousand years ago. Objects that survived empires, wars, collapses, migrations, kings, merchants, soldiers, and ordinary people trying to survive their own lives.

I needed to know more.

So I started researching obsessively. I joined groups. Asked questions constantly. Read everything I could. Studied ancient history for years trying to understand not just the coins themselves, but the world that created them.

And that process changed my life.

The deeper I went, the more I realized ancient coins were unlike any other collectible on earth. They are history, art, propaganda, religion, economics, politics, mythology, and storytelling all struck into metal.

Once I finally got my footing, I could not stop talking about them.

I started sharing them with friends, collectors, and eventually complete beginners. And I kept seeing the same reaction over and over again — that moment where somebody suddenly realizes:

"Wait… I can actually own something from the Roman Empire?"

That spark never gets old.

That is why I focus so heavily on entry-level collectors today. I want people to experience the same wonder I did. I want the hobby to feel accessible instead of intimidating.

I am not a PhD historian. I am not the foremost expert in ancient numismatics. I am a collector who fell in love with history. If I know something, I will gladly share it. If I do not know something, I will ask experts and keep learning. That has always been my philosophy.

After my father passed, my mother became one of my biggest cheerleaders. She encouraged me to take chances, keep building, and carry the standard forward. I do not think Kinzer Coins exists in the way it does today without that encouragement.

Kinzer Coins was never built around the idea of squeezing maximum profit out of people. It was built around trying to make this hobby meaningful, approachable, and exciting for new collectors.

I want to use modern technology, photography, storytelling, and media to help people visualize these worlds the same way I did as a kid watching Gladiator or Braveheart.

Because once you truly understand what these coins are, they stop being pieces of metal.

They become artifacts of humanity.